No one told me how disorienting becoming a mother would be. I didn’t feel the joy I expected during pregnancy. Instead, I felt increasingly disconnected from other people, and from myself.

Looking back, I can see the vicious circle. I felt ashamed of not feeling the joy I thought I ‘should’ feel when pregnant. So, I didn’t tell anyone how I was feeling.  So I isolated. And the isolation, of course, made everything worse.

During my pregnancy, my mental health declined. At four months pregnant, I became a patient in a mental health facility. I don’t remember much of the five weeks I was there. A dingy bedroom. Picking at food. An inability to concentrate. A deep sense of being alone. Then I came home. Still feeling alone, but at least I could make my own food.

And then my beautiful son arrived.

If my pregnancy was about depression, early motherhood was about anxiety.

I would freeze. I was anxious about even the smallest things. Breastfeeding. Putting the pram together felt overwhelming. Taking my son for a drive. What if I didn’t do it right?

At the time, I thought this was my failing. Later, I understood it as anxiety. And even later, I realised something deeper had shifted. I had always trusted myself. And suddenly, I didn’t.

During pregnancy and following my son’s birth, I did have practical family support, but they couldn’t be there all the time. I also had mental health support, but it didn’t fully account for the fact I was becoming a mother. It wasn’t perinatal-specific. I didn’t even know such services existed, or that there were clinicians trained to support mothers feeling exactly as I was.  

So, I made sense of it the only way I could. I decided it was me. It was my fault.

Joining a mother’s group was a turning point. I was so anxious that my mum had to walk me to the first session. But once I got there, something began to shift.

It wasn’t just me who felt like she was failing at this ‘mum thing’. Everyone had their own issues: sleep, feeding, ‘who am I now?’, guilt.  Different details, but the same story underneath.

I made two close friends in that group. For nearly three years, we met up multiple times a week.

Those friendships, that routine, the intimacy of three new mums sitting in the same parks, day in and day out carried me. And slowly, my anxiety let me breathe again.

It wasn’t until years later, when my son was around five, that I began to understand my experience more fully. I worked with a yoga therapist to learn how to best support my nervous system through breathing and meditation. Learning about matrescence was like discovering the missing piece of a puzzle. It gave language to some of what I had experienced: when you become a mother, you also give birth to a new version of yourself. Knowing this changed how I saw my story.  

I realised I hadn’t failed at pregnancy. There was so much I didn’t know. So much I had been unprepared for. So, I’ve learnt to give myself grace. I even have the word grace tattooed on the inside of my arm - because when the guilt and the shoulds pile up, it helps to have a reminder.

I started sharing my story and talking about the specialised perinatal mental health support that exists. Because I didn’t know it was there. Now I do and I want other women to know it’s there too.

Ten years on, my primary memory of my pregnancy is of feeling numb, disconnected and alone. Recently I surprised myself by feeling sad when I saw a joyful baby bump photo on Instagram. I sat down and journalled, and wrote this:

I was disconnected from the experience of being pregnant, as much as I was disconnected from the world at large.
It was like I was in a bubble.
It felt like I was skimming across 39 weeks. Hard to see. Leaving no trace.
Each night I was grounded by a bedtime story read to my belly.
Each morning I woke back in the bubble, floating.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Invisible. Invisible. Invisible.

I don’t want any mother to feel as alone as I did.

If I could go back and tell my pregnant self anything, it would be this:
You’re not failing.
You are doing your absolute best.
You deserve support that sees all of you.